First Look: Samsung PNC7000 Series

First Look: Samsung PNC7000 Series

3:08 /
July 15, 2010

The Samsung PNC7000 series is surprisingly thin for a plasma HDTV, but it packs 3D features, Hulu Plus, and many more tweaks.

>>Hi, I'm David Katzmaier from CNET. I'm sitting next to the Samsung PNC7000 series. This is Samsung's second most expensive plasma TV for 2010. A couple of high points on this TV, its 3D compatible, we'll get to that in a little bit, it's also vanishingly thin. If you look at this TV on the side, it's about 1.2-inches deep, you might mistake it for a LCD TV but it's actually plasma. The TV is pretty slick. Otherwise around the edge you'll find a matt sort of metallic finish around that there's a transparent edge. There's also a transparent stand stock and this nice stainless steel sort of top of the stand finishes off the picture. It's a very slick looking TV.
Feature wise, this TV has all the bells and whistles. There's 3D as we mentioned. This TV doesn't include the required 3D glasses; however, they're about $150 a piece. Of course, you can't use Samsung glasses with another TV and vice versa but you're going to need a pair of glasses for everyone in the family that wants to view 3D. This Samsung also includes a 2D to 3D conversion system on this TV so you can watch everything in 3D although that really doesn't work as well as we'd like to see. It kind of made us a little bit sick when we tried it out. We get to 3D performance in a little bit but first let's take a look at some other features. This TV has an extensive app selection which means that you can go into the menu and access a lot of internet services. The coolest are the streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, Vudu. This TV has also the only one on the market right now to include Hulu Plus. Samsung apps has an exclusive now until November and then we think another couple TV makers are going to include Hulu Plus as well but for now it's an exclusive that allows you to get some Hulu content on this TV as well so all in all the apps are very compelling on this set.
Other features include a wealth of picture adjustments. You can play around with gamma. There's a 10.0 IRE system new for 2010 and a couple of other picture tweaks so calibrators will a lot to do to adjust the picture quality on this set. Around back you'll find a strange looking input bay that's because the TV is so thin there's actually four HDMI inputs on the back. Just one component video input though. There's also a PC input, a land port and a few other inputs so all told pretty good connectivity on the set. There are also two USB ports which is nice if you want to use the optional Wi-Fi adapter for all that internet stuff. Of course, the Wi-Fi adapter is another $100.
When we took the Samsung into the lab we were generally impressed by its picture quality. It has a nice deep black level. The color accuracy is pretty darn good. Of course, those tweaks really help for that. It doesn't have 1080p/24 compatibility, however, so video files might miss that 24-frame cadence native to film but most people won't really notice the difference. For 3D we actually like the 3D effect on this TV a lot better than we did on some of the LCD TVs we tried out earlier. There's less cross talk which is interference that kind of looks like a ghostly outline. Of course, 3D content does vary. Sometimes it can be a little hard to watch but we expect the content to improve in the future and, again, it's pretty scarce right now. You're going to get a 3D Blu-ray player and, of course, the 3D TV receiver from DIRECTV. They're kind of the only guys that do it right now. There are a couple others out there but in general 3D on this TV does look pretty darn good. That's a quick look at the Samsung PNC7000 series and I'm David Katzmaier.